Ever since season 2 of Marvel’s Daredevil premiered on Netflix, I’ve been in a bit of a superhero mood, which was not entirely satiated by Captain America: Winter Soldier’s simultaneous appearance on the service. (It was a great movie! The problem was, it only made me want more of that universe.) I’ve also taken to playing LEGO Marvel Superheroes, but there’s a time and a place to discuss such matters.
I’ve wanted to get in to graphic novels for years now, but the problem has always been knowing where to start. Every time I google “<comic> chronological reading order” I’m baffled by long lists of variations of different continuities, alternate universes and having to read issue #23 of a completely irrelevant comic in between 4 different superhero team-up series before I can continue along the main line. Even simply trying to go through the publishing order, which I eventually ended up doing, required some careful googling before I could figure out which series counted as the first one, and was preceded by no other continuity for the superhero.
I’ve settled on Spider-Man. Spider-Man was my first real superhero, as I watched the movies growing up and thought the guy was pretty gosh darn cool. I was a Batman fan at the same time, but hush, we’re talkin’ Marvel here. I wanted someone who’d fit into the Avengers universe eventually, as my current love for superheroes stems from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is about as mainstream as superheroes get.
So after some good research, I traveled to 1963 in order to read The Amazing Spider-Man from its very inception. And oh boy, how things were different. I may be no comic reading expert, but I’m fairly certain that these early graphic novels are far cornier, have far less subtle writing and most interestingly for me, portray a much different society to what we see in graphic novels (and fiction in general) today. I mean, sure, you can read periodical fiction based in the 60’s, but no matter how well it captures the world-gone-by, it’s never quite caught the fascination of reading source material from the era itself. Plus, modern periodical fiction can never quite escape the fact that it’s still writing from a different society, making present-perspective social commentaries about the time period and omitting other social commentaries which works from the 60’s may have included… such as one of Spider-Man’s first villains being a ‘commie spy’. It’s also interesting to note artistic depictions of the common citizen, attitudes towards women, and hell, even the price of the comics themselves (only 12 cents per issue!).
I also looked up Stan Lee, having known criminally little about the man other than the fact that he exists. It astonished me to discover that he’s in his nineties, meaning that he was already in his forties when he began writing the very first Spider-Man comics. (As a floundering 20 year old student writer, this gives me hope for the future.) I know he’s created plenty of other comic heroes over the years (Spider-Man himself having been preceded by the Fantastic Four). I look forward to becoming better acquainted with his creations.
The original story of Spider-Man itself is also a marvel (sorry). I’m only ten issues in so far, but it’s highly interesting to me that Harry Osborn, Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy are nowhere to be seen, with Peter Parker instead being harassed by Flash Thompson and chasing a far more typical 60’s girl named Liz. Going on, I’m excited to see how the later characters are introduced into the series (if they’re introduced at all besides popping up or emerging in some reboot), and how the rest of the story will pan out. I may be a few years late, but I’m finally hopping on the graphic novel train.
Perpetually Perturbed 